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Mapping 5,000 Years of City Growth

I recently stumbled upon a great dataset. It’s the first to provide comprehensive data for world city sizes as far back as 3700BC. The authors (Meredith Reba, Femke Reitsma & Karen Seto) write:

How were cities distributed globally in the past? How many people lived in these cities? How did cities influence their local and regional environments? In order to understand the current era of urbanization, we must understand long-term historical urbanization trends and patterns. However, to date there is no comprehensive record of spatially explicit, historic, city-level population data at the global scale. Here, we developed the first spatially explicit dataset of urban settlements from 3700 BC to AD 2000, by digitizing, transcribing, and geocoding historical, archaeological, and census-based urban population data previously published in tabular form by Chandler and Modelski.

These kinds of data are crying out to be mapped so that’s what I did…

Creating the Maps

I was keen to see how easy it was to produce an animated map with R and the ggplot2 package from these data. It turned out to be a slightly bigger job than I thought – partly because the cleaned data doesn’t have all the population estimates updating for every city each year so there’s a bit of a messy loop at the start of the code to get that bit working, and partly because there a LOADS of different parameters to tweak on ggplot to get the maps looking the way I like. The script below will generate a series of PNGs that can be strung together into an animation using a graphics package. I’m a big fan of what ggplot2 can do now and I hope, at the very least, the chunks of ggplot2 code below will provide a useful template for similar mapping projects.

R Code

load data – this is the processed file from http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201634 I offer no guarantees about whether I ran the script correctly etc! I’d encourage you to take the data direct from the authors.

#City data
citiesalldata.csv")
#for some reason the coords were loaded as factors so I've created two new numeric fields here
cities$X

Take a look at the data

head(cities)

Create the base map

base

Now plot the cities on top – with circles scaled by city size. Here I am using the mollweide projection. This script loops through the data and checks for updates from one year to the next. It then plots the cities as proportional circles for each year and saves out an image for each 100 years of data. If you are just interested in the maps themselves and have your own point data then most of the below can be ignored.

Set the breaks for the size of the circles

size_breaks

#Here I'm looping through the data each year to select the years required and comparing/ updating the values for each city.
count

Just to make things a little more interesting I wanted to try a plot of two hemispheres (covering most, but not all) of the globe. I’ve also added the key in between them. This depends on the plot_grid() functionality as well as a few extra steps you’ll spot that we didn’t need above.